About the ChargeLab CSMS

OVERVIEW

The main goal of the ChargeLab CSMS (also known as the site host dashboard) is to give EV charging site hosts and operators the tools to manage their charging infrastructure easily, intuitively and at scale. Through the dashboard, users have the ability to configure chargers, control driver access, monitor charger performance and troubleshoot issues remotely.

Role
Product Designer & Researcher

Tools
Figma, Figma Make, Claude

Timeline
3 weeks (1 simultaneous week of product discovery and technical discovery, 1 week of design and 1 of validation research)

Context + Problem

ChargeLab's CSMS platform helps operators run EV chargers across multiple companies and sites, often meaning networks have hundreds of users that need to be managed. Unfortunately, our users had no scalable way to do this with the existing user management features, putting a large burden on our support and solutions engineering team. They often spent hours manually adding or removing users and managing their roles across various companies. Power users (both internal and external) expressed that this was a pain point for anyone managing more than 20 users. One of our largest network operators, managing 100+ users, was actively pushing for a way to self-serve rather than escalate every permission change to our support team.

We needed to enable admins to manage user permissions, allowing them to limit which companies and what roles each user holds. The current interface was very limited and was not designed for operators to manage hundreds of companies and roles at once. The core challenge was simple: how can we make the process of adding, removing and updating roles simpler for power users?

OVERVIEW

Design Goals

• Empower users to make changes to roles at a super admin, network, or company level, within a single, consistent experience that scales across all three

• Empower admins to add and remove users as needed

• Show the right level of detail for the task at hand, letting users dig deeper as needed

• Enable all users to self-serve permission changes end-to-end, without needing to escalate to ChargeLab's support team

PLANNING

Solution validation with Claude and Figma Make

With the use of Claude and Figma Make, we managed to spin up prototypes that allowed us to get valuable feedback from a few of our largest clients. Through this exercise, we iterated the solution before handing it off to our development team. Due to the complexity of this project, the prototypes also proved to be valuable for our developers as certain flows and key decisions could be shown more visually.

RESEARCH

Final Results

The final solution addressed how a ChargeLab super admin (someone managing users across potentially thousands of companies) could view, filter and manage permissions from a single interface without losing context. It introduced a two-mode experience (an all companies view and a single companies view) to address the various user types we have. The decisions made ensure that the experience would scale as our clients continued to add users to their dashboards.

The support and solutions engineering teams were the first to notice the drop in requests to add and remove users across large groups of companies. Power users at some of our largest customers also felt confident making these changes themselves, freeing up internal support resources as ChargeLab's user base continued to grow.

SOLUTION + IMPACT